After having soft launched Persumi in 2023, I quickly found myself wanting to explore better ways to promote the product. Unfortunately, most of digital marketing products are focused on three main areas: 1. Keyword bidding, e.g. Google Ads or Facebook Ads 2. Cold outreach, e.g. Apollo 3. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) They each has its own pros and cons. As an indie developer without a huge budget, none of these tools work effectively. The Challenges Keyword bidding and targeted ads are...

The article compares six AI OCR tools: AWS Textract, Microsoft Azure Document Intelligence, Google Cloud Document AI, Rossum.ai, Super.ai and Eden.ai. It then does a deep comparison between Azure and Google, the two leading choices, in several aspects: initial setup, auto labelling data, text detection and recognition, custom labelling, auto-label accuracy, auto-label result verification, data training speed, data regions and compliance. The article concludes that Azure is the better choice.

A few weeks ago I soft launched an MVP - you are looking at it right now. In this post I'll talk about the features, the tech stack and the globally distributed infrastructure behind building this MVP, and of course, with a sprinkle of learnings too. The "MVP" Deciding what makes up an "MVP" is always interesting - I've heard some saying if the product isn't embarrassing you're releasing it too late, and also if the product is embarrassing, you're not gonna make it. For me, I've always had th...

Like many software engineers and indie hackers, I dream of and experiment with different product ideas every now and then. Five years ago, in 2018, I toyed with an idea where personas and expressions are the enablers for showcasing people's talents and interests. I called it, Persumi. The Origin The original idea was to break the pattern of modern day social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, where every person is hidden behind a two-dimensional facade. Words and photos are...

As coding bootcamps such as Coder Academy and General Assembly churn out more and more software developers, and as more and more people start to realise the importance of software, companies these days are facing an increased amount of candidates applying for junior dev roles. Recently we had to take down our job ad for a junior full stack React and Elixir role only a few days after posting it due to having received about 300 applications. Suffice to say, the competition is fierce at the entry-l...